


Other Circumstances

by Dustbunnygirl



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2016-02-01
Packaged: 2018-05-17 12:51:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5870344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dustbunnygirl/pseuds/Dustbunnygirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Under any other circumstances, an exuberant Roman soldier would be my idea of a perfect morning.” – Captain Jack Harkness, End of Days</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>There are a lot of things about being a plastic Centurion that Rory tries to forget.  But it's the one thing he was never meant to remember that might get him in trouble with his wife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Other Circumstances

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don’t own Doctor Who, or Rory Williams, Jack Harkness, Amy Pond, the Doctor, or the TARDIS. The BBC owns them all. I just borrowed them for a minute and returned them in mostly the same condition that they were in when I found them. More or less.
> 
> Spoilers for "The Angels Take Manhattan" and, vaguely, "The Empty Child," sort of.

Rory Williams doesn’t always remember his time in plastic. He goes whole days anymore without a single reminder of his time as a Centurion, or guarding the Pandorica, or waiting all that time for Amy. Two thousand years are tucked neatly away in a convenient cupboard in his memory, hidden behind closed doors and secured by a sturdy lock. The key stays in the lock, though, just in case of emergencies, but it doesn’t fly open on its own much anymore. (Emergencies these days involve forgetting to pick up milk on the way home and a broken pipe in the kitchen, not random Daleks or Cybermen or cracks in the space-time continuum.) Sometimes, he wonders if all the time in the TARDIS made it harder to forget; not just the endless stream of chaos and monsters, but the time vortex and the little reminders the Doctor and his impossible blue box are. Were.  
  
So he has a life; a normal, human, simple, time travel-free one. He has a job, and a house, and a mortgage. He won’t go into how remarkably easy that all was to get in the 1930s, especially in a world without computers tracking every moment of your life and no paperwork to speak of. Amy writes books full of fanciful adventures or hard-boiled dames and grumbles in the privacy of their brownstone about the gender politics of pre-World War II America. They drink substandard beer, go to black and white movies, and whenever their world slows down enough that they have a minute to let their minds wander, they think about their families, and their friends, and a sad, lonely Doctor they hope has found someone else to hold his hand across the Universe. But it’s a life, and it’s theirs, and most of the time, they’re just Amy and Rory Williams, regular people in a regular place doing regular things.  
  
And then something will happen that brings all of it tumbling back like an avalanche, every ounce of Rory the Roman, the Last Centurion, pouring right out of that cupboard.  
  
He’s walking through Central Park with Amy on a mild July Saturday, having an ice cream. Amy’s cut her hair, something cute and stylish and very 40s – “Futuristic retro. I’m starting a trend,” she’d said, and laughed - that Rory missed entirely when he walked through the door. The ice creams are his penance. But he doesn’t mind paying it. There’s a sweet breeze full of the scent of just cut grass sweeping her hair against her cheeks and her smile is warm and just a little troublesome. A very Amy smile. He fell in love with that smile when they were six years old. Decades ago. Or is it decades to come? Or two thousand years behind them? It’s hard to talk about time when you’ve traveled with the Doctor.  
  
Rory catches a glimpse out of the corner of his eye, just a half-second’s tease of a man leaning against a park bench, a salacious grin turned on the blushing woman sitting below him. His dark hair is combed back and Brylcream’d to suave perfection; his suit is crisp and unwrinkled despite the heat. He looks up in that brief moment and catches Rory’s eye and winks. The name slips out through the barely opened doors of that well-locked cupboard in Rory’s mind and slides, unbidden, from his tongue:  
  
“Jack bloody Harkness.”  
  
***  
  
It felt like waking from a dream. Rory opened his eyes and gasped in a breath and stared up into a star-dotted sky. For a moment, the reality of Amy, the Doctor, and the TARDIS lingered at the forefront of his mind, as real as the ground beneath him. He felt Amy’s tears on his cheeks, heard her sobs; heard her begging him not to go. He still felt himself dying. But the longer he thought about it, the fuzzier it all became. Other thoughts crept out of the depths of his brain. They felt foreign at first – strange words in a strange language; names and faces and facts and a whole life pouring in like someone turned on a tap – but they became more solid and real the longer he thought about them. The other thoughts faded. Amy and the Doctor and the TARDIS melted away, leaving shadows dancing at the far edges of his thoughts. They were there, but elusive, slipping free any time he tried to grab them and look at them too long.  
  
He stopped being Rory Williams, nurse from Leadworth and erstwhile time-traveler, and became Roronicus, Roman soldier stationed in the hinterlands of Britannia. It felt wrong; it also felt natural and normal. A deeply buried part of him rebelled at the thought of fighting – and killing – the Celts they were sent to battle. That part cringed at the blood on his hands, or his sword, or his armor, after every skirmish. There were nights all he dreamt of were the screams of the fallen and blood he could never scrub from his hands. On those nights, he almost remembered another life, and helping people; repairing wounds instead of inflicting them. Those nights, he dreamed of red hair caught in the wind and the gasping, stuttered groan of a machine older than the universe.  
  
One such night, he woke with a half-choked cry caught in his throat and fresh tears on his cheeks. His chest felt empty and bursting all at once. The hand holding the blanket at his chest clutched the thin material of his tunic, too; was it trying to keep his heart from breaking out, or preparing to reach in and rip it free himself? He couldn’t breathe around the word still lodged in his throat, and he couldn’t force it out, either. “Amy,” lingered there, sharp and brittle and he never, ever knew how it got there.  
  
He fought out of his bedroll like it might swallow him otherwise and scrambled across the tent until he hit the edge of it. He sat there, trapped by a thin barrier of cloth, and stared at the shadows cast by the sentry fires outside as they skittered over the tent while he tried to catch his breath. It was a cold night; even in the minimal light, he saw the white puffs of his breath. Something nagged at the edges of his conscious thought, poking and tugging and all but screaming for attention, but no more tangible than the tufts of steam he sent into the air with every exhale. He couldn’t catch them. Not even for a second. They dissipated into the air before his hand could reach.  
  
When he felt less like he might crawl out of his own skin, he stood and gathered clothing and armor and his sword. Sleep was futile. Tossing back the flap, he stepped out into the night air and dragged a chilling breath of it deep into his lungs. It chased out the last vestiges of unspoken screams. The first sentry he approached looked half-asleep on his feet, but snapped to quick, terrified attention as he caught sight of Rory.  
  
“Sir!” he said, and gave a half-trembling salute. Rory chuckled quietly to himself; he’d only been promoted to Centurion in the last week and hadn’t entirely adapted to the saluting yet.  
  
“At ease, Marcius.” He patted the soldier on the shoulder. “Things been quiet?”  
  
“Yes, sir. Not a sign of trouble so far.”  
  
Rory nodded. That unsettled feeling that always accompanied his nightmares lingered and grew as he watched the edges of the forest ahead. “Think I’ll take a quick look around the perimeter. Try to stay alert, hmm? Relief should be along soon.”  
  
“Yes, sir!” Marcius saluted again. Rory returned the gesture, then strode out past the edges of the fire light, his hand resting on the pummel of his sword.  
  
The sky was clear despite the chill and a half-full moon cast a pale, mute light over the bare trees and brittle undergrowth. Rory’s boots crunched through dry grass and dead leaves as he crept along a familiar path. He hadn’t really seen anything or heard anything that made him wary; just had a gnawing feeling in his stomach that insisted he move. The dream often left him that way. Sometimes, the feeling lasted the length of a short walk; sometimes, it felt like he chased half-formed, red-haired ghosts the entire night. He never knew what would happen if he ever caught that ghost or got the chance for more than just a fleeting glimpse of it, but he kept trying.  
  
Besides, it didn’t have to be a fruitless use of his time. They often found Celt scouts roaming the tree line, watching for openings and chances to attack. Small, quick skirmishes were the order of the day lately, as the other side tested the mettle of the Roman Legion. It never went the way they wanted, though. So far. Rory always allowed for the possibility of defeat and planned against it.  
  
Rory had walked for perhaps ten minutes when a sudden flash split the darkness directly in front of him. For a second, his Roman brain dismissed the sight as lightning. Then a voice spoke up from that elusive corner of his mind and said, in an exasperated and wholly feminine burr, “You need clouds for lightning, Rory.” Before he had time to suss out why the voice in his head was a woman, a man appeared in the center of the flash, facing away from Rory. It was a mostly bare back; he wore a sloppy, makeshift toga-like garment that looked on the constant verge of coming undone.

“Whoa. That’s disorienting,” the man said, his tenuous hold on any sort of uprightness threatened by a persistent wobble. “Need to remember not to make jumps while entirely sloshed. Those never go well.”

“Who...how…” Rory stopped blinking and gawking after a second and that unintelligible stammer and drew his sword. “Turn about and face me, intruder, and have the good sense to surrender.”

The new arrival’s head lolled bonelessly to the left before it turned to look back at Rory over a bare shoulder. With a crooked, sloppy grin, he said, “A Centurion. This is my lucky night.” He spun around, the cocky look making it apparent he intended the move to be much more graceful than it was. He didn’t make it halfway round before his feet tangled together and he tumbled to the ground in a flailing heap of legs and arms and twisted material. As the man’s legs went up in the air, Rory got a clear view of the red, blue, and white briefs under the haphazard toga. In a sudden flash of confusing insight, Rory wondered why a Roman was wearing Union Jack pants. Then, he wondered how he even knew what a Union Jack was. Questions for later. He lowered his sword so the tip hovered above the prone, giggling man. “Identify yourself and your purpose, sir, or prepare to be dispatched.”

The man paused in his giggling and looked up, a grin Rory could only describe as wicked tugging at the one corner of his expressive lips. “Name - Captain Jack Harkness. Purpose - fun. Do I get a vote about what specifically is getting dispatched?” He reached up for the sword and ran his fingers along the flat part of the blade in a clumsy and pointed caress. “Because I might have a suggestion or two. A nice, long suggestion.”

“That’s not the kind of dispatching I meant.” Rory jerked the sword away, barely managing to not slice one of Jack’s fingers off in the process. He pointed the sword with a rough thrust of his arm. “What are you doing here? What business brings you to our encampment?”

“That’s a funny story, actually.” Jack reached for a leather cuff on his left wrist. He flipped up a flap on the top to reveal a screen that gave off a soft, dull glow. It bothered Rory that the sight of the strange object didn’t bother him. It bothered him more that he found something in the bastard that intrigued the hell out of him. _I’ve been around Romans too long_ , he thought. Wait. What did that even mean? “I was trying to invent the toga party about twenty years ahead of schedule. Algy broke out the Commander’s scotch, things got a little rowdier than I expected, and I had to make a quick and unplanned exit. I must have mangled my coordinates.” He looked up at Rory, then the sky overhead, then back to his cuff. “Britannia, right? Sometime in the early A.D.’s?”

“About that, yeah.”

“And you’re a Centurion, part of the Roman Legion, attempting to spread the joy and wonder of the ‘glorious Roman Empire’. Right?” He bracketed the “glorious Roman Empire” in air quotes.  Rory prickled at the not-so-veiled insult. He squared his shoulders and stretched up to his maximum height.

“I’d watch your tongue if I were you, intruder. We don’t stand for…”

“Bullshit.” Jack flipped the cover of his cuff shut and used the nearest tree to help him to his feet. “And you can watch my tongue for me, if you’d like. It knows a few really neat tricks.”

Rory tightened his grip on his sword and took a needed step back as Jack rose. His cheeks felt warm, and they weren’t the only thing, either. Damn it, and damn him, too. “Excuse me?”

“To which part?" Jack leaned his bare shoulder into the tree for support. His grin was aggravating in its cockiness. “A man appears in front of you out of thin air, talking about coordinates and toga parties and other weird nonsense, flashing technology too advanced for the time period, and you don’t even flinch? And, just for laughs, does it all in a language that won’t exist, in the form he’s using it, for a good thousand years or so, which you not only understand, but speak perfectly back at him? Uh-huh. I call bullshit.”  
  
“No, that’s…I’m speaking Roman - I mean Latin! I’m speaking Latin. You’re speaking Latin. We’re all speaking…”  
  
Jack lunged while Rory floundered. He had the sword out of the Centurion’s hand and at his neck before Rory could react. “No, you started out speaking Latin. You switched to English when you heard me use it. Rookie mistake. Time travel 101, really. The Agency did a pants job training you, didn’t they?”  
  
“I really have no idea what you’re talking about, but I am pretty sure you’re absolutely insane.” Rory felt the sharp edge of the sword resting against his throat. He wondered if Jack actually knew how to use one. Pointless thought, really, when a man has a blade at your neck, but wondered all the same. Not a lot of skill needed to slit someone’s throat when the blade’s already in position and is good and sharp.  He knew his was. To use a highly overdone metaphor, he also knew of another blade that was working on getting that “sharp”, too. Not literally sharp. Poetically speaking. Not something that frequently happened when someone was an inch away from killing him.  
  
“You’re not the first person to tell me that. Probably not the last, either. Also not the point.” He leaned in, close enough Rory could smell the faint traces of liquor on his breath and the equally faint, tempting heat that rose from Jack’s skin. Could feel the last, too, through the thin cloth that did such a poor job separating them. “Feels like you might be getting the point, though. Who are you?”  
  
Rory had been around Romans too long; leagues from home, surrounded by other men, most of them not really very particular about being…well, particular in certain areas. He’d never tested the waters, so to speak, himself, but he knew it happened. Even understood it. Hell, he’d found himself looking a little too long – and too longingly – at a few members of the legion in his more pathetic and lonely moments. Something held him back, but it had nothing to do with moral objections. Had to do with flashes of red hair and ghosts he never caught. But the stranger currently threatening to slice his head off had him rethinking his position. Lots of positions, actually.  
  
Wait. Head. Head! Right.  
  
“Cat got your tongue, Centurion?”  
  
“Actually…” It took careful planning and a willingness to bleed a little to pull the maneuver off, but if done correctly, he risked nothing more than a scratch on his end. Rory smiled, not an expression anyone might call sweet at all, then rammed their foreheads together with brute force. He felt the pressure of the blade increase briefly but didn’t feel its sting. Jack, on the other hand, stumbled backwards at the impact, something of the drunken wobbliness still in his feet, and he loosed his grip on the sword in the process. Rory reclaimed the blade with a firm yank, then backed Jack into the closest tree, pinning him there by the edge of his blade and his own weight. “You can call me Rory.”  
  
He blamed what happened next on adrenaline, a depth of loneliness he didn’t fully understand, and a confusion about the whole situation that made his head hurt above and beyond what the headbutt had caused. Hell, he even blamed that – brain damage or trauma that made what he did next seem more logical than dragging Jack back to camp to interrogate him and find out what the hell he was really up to. The why of it didn’t matter in the end. The what of it did, and the what in that case was Rory’s mouth latching firmly, fiercely, onto Jack’s frustrating smirk.  
  
Rory almost expected Jack to fight. Strange man with a sword decides to snog you at blade-edge, most people feel the need to object. Jack’s mouth melted under Rory’s instead. His lips yielded in an instant, parted under the barest coaxing of Rory’s tongue. Before Rory even had time to wrap his mind around the ease of the stranger’s surrender, Jack’s hands were picking apart buckles and straps as if he’d done so countless times before; armor fell away in pieces and the clatter of each made Rory’s pulse jump a little more. He dropped the sword to join the growing pile of leather and tin and helped. When warm, eager fingers gave up their work to slide under his shrift and wrap around his cock, Rory’s hands momentarily forgot how buckles worked.  
  
“Oh, Christ.” The words dragged Rory’s lips from Jack’s throat. His hips jerked forward, into the touch. Jack’s grin felt like sin itself against Rory’s ear.  
  
“Definitely not from around here.” The words were a rough whisper, amused and scalding on Rory’s skin. Retaliation came when Rory’s own hand, cool from the night air and calloused from a Centurion’s life, slid under Jack’s toga and cupped him through thin, ineffectual cotton.  
  
“Shutting up would be really handy right about now,” he said. Jack’s waistband offered no resistance at all. Rory was pretty sure, in fact, that it existed entirely as a “please start here” indicator, and he was more than happy to follow the intended instruction. His hand slipped inside and found hard, hot skin waiting for his touch. It pulsed and throbbed in his hand as he worked it in short, constrained strokes that made Jack pant at his ear.  
  
“If you really want me quiet…” Jack’s voice had gone husky and raw in the few moments since the first touch. His eyes were dark; the pupils wide and black. His grin reminded Rory of pictures he’d seen as a boy of the Devil. It should have been a warning; should have been all the announcement needed to proclaim, without fail, that Jack Harkness Plans to Be Bad, copyright pending. Rory felt sure, in that moment, that hundreds, if not thousands, of people had fallen victim to that grin in any number of ways, a lot of them in the way he fell victim to it then. And he didn’t care. He only cared about one thing in that moment, and it was the feel of Jack’s hand on him, and his on Jack, and the hungry, desperate sounds they both made as a result of all that contact.  
  
Which was, of course, the moment when Jack chose to put a stop to all of it. His hand slid away and Rory whined – actually whined. Then Jack grabbed Rory’s wrist and stilled his fingers, too. The action almost felt reluctant.  
  
“Keep this right here,” Jack said, dragging Rory’s hand from his briefs and pressing the palm to the rough bark just to the right of his head. He did the same with Rory’s other hand as well. “Keep them both right there. Moving them away will have consequences. Besides, you’re going to need something to hold onto.”  
  
There was that grin again, evil and tempting and with the promise of great things – if it didn’t kill you first. Jack kept wearing it as he slid down in the space between Rory and the tree trunk. Anticipation built along Rory’s nerves from his fingers downward, centering in a low, desperate throb between his legs. When Jack’s tongue finally licked a hot trail up the underside of his cock, Rory breathed out a litany of prayer to every deity in the Roman pantheon. He might have made up a few as well. He dropped one hand to Jack’s head, tangling in the wild dark chaos of it to try to urge him onward. Jack grabbed his wrist and yanked it free. His tongue stilled and his eyes slid up Rory’s half-exposed body; intent glowed outward from those eyes. “Consequences,” the look reminded him. Rory slapped his palm back against the tree.  
  
He was rewarded a moment later as Jack’s lips parted around him, engulfing him in one long, unhurried slide. Slow, by all appearances, was to be the theme. He started a leisurely, agonizing bob up and down Rory’s cock, too damned slow and just fucking right all at once. Rory tried to rock into that frustrating, delicious rhythm, urge all due speed ahead, and Jack’s fingers dug into his hips to still him. There would be no altering of Jack’s itinerary.  It was torture of the absolute sweetest and deadliest kind, the type of agonizing pleasure that drove men to madness. It was both too much and nowhere near enough in ways that defied all logic and there was nothing Rory could do but moan and gasp and beg in alternating patterns and hold on for the ride. His fingernails dug into the bark and he felt it crumble to pieces and scrape his skin. And he didn’t care.  
  
Finally, Jack took pity; the begging and pleading were enough. Jack’s lips gave up their torturous pace and began to slide over Rory in an increasing pace, growing faster, rougher in accordance to the sounds tumbling from Rory’s lips. His forehead fell forward to join his hands against the bark. Jack’s grip loosened on Rory’s hips and he took it as permission to move. He couldn’t have stopped himself if he tried, and Jack did nothing but egg him on. He came with a throat-shredding growl, his head tossed back, his whole body rigid as he screamed out his relief to the stars.

It might have sounded quite a bit like “Amy,” in retrospect.  
  
His head must have fallen forward again at some point; he might have blacked out for a second as well. He went from howling at the nearly absent moon to staring too close at rough, manhandled bark. Rory knew a bit how the poor, abused tree felt, though his manhandling had been fantastic. Below and between them, Jack chuckled.  
  
“You’d better not be falling asleep on me yet, soldier.” His hands, still at Rory’s hips, urged him down to the mossy ground with him. “We’re nowhere near done yet.”  
  
  
Later, sprawled together in a sweaty, exhausted heap under the sheet that had been Jack’s toga, the mysterious stranger touched a new lump on his forehead and winced. “I didn’t think Centurions specialized in headbutting. More the slash and burn types.”  
  
Rory laughed. It almost felt like the natural thing to do. “That’s not so much a legion-approved skill. Amy showed me that one. Said it might…” His voice trailed off. For a moment, that flash of red hair that always disappeared into his periphery lingered front and center in full view. Yards of long, red hair; green eyes bright with hope and mischief; the sassiest, sweetest grin he’d ever seen. It melted into nothing before he had a chance to fully latch on, but for a second… He shook his head and left the ghosts to the shadows. There wasn’t exactly room for them right then, anyway. “You never said why you’re here,” he said, a roughness to his voice that had nothing to do with being spent.  
  
Jack shrugged. “Fun, as I said. And on that topic…” One handed, he shoved Rory onto his back and mantled himself above the Centurion. “Just how Roman are you, anyway?”  
  
  
The next morning, Rory woke up alone, with a headache and no memory of what transpired the night before. He was dressed, chilled, with his sword beside him. When he picked his weapon up, he noticed someone had scrawled the word “Amy?” in the dirt beneath it. His head hurt enough that trying to drag up the spark of recognition beckoning from the back of his brain felt like trying to chisel through his skull. He made his way back to camp instead of dwelling on it, sore and stiff in places that had nothing to do with how he’d fallen asleep. No one at the camp had any answers for him, either, nor did they really have time to help him attempt to piece any of it together. Rumor had begun to spread amongst the ranks that Cleopatra had arrived at the commander’s tent that morning, and two visitors had followed suit not long after, to see her – a strange, gangly man and a tall, oddly dressed girl with very red hair.

***  
  
“Rory?” Amy nudges him in the side with a sharp, indignant elbow. All her joints, no matter the location, are sharp and indignant when she pokes him with them.  
  
“What?” He blinks and looks over at his sweet, sassy, would-never-let-him-live-it-down wife with the world’s least believable confused expression. Oh, it’s not the gay part she’d have trouble with. Not even necessarily the sex part, either – hard to hold someone to fidelity when they’re technically dead and the universe has made it so they never existed in the first place, after all, and then tosses them back into reality as a resurrected plastic Roman. The “you forgot about the gay sex?” part? He would never live that down, even if he still can’t figure out how exactly he forgot it in the first place. Every lost set of keys or forgotten lunch would inspire comments like, “Oh, like you forgot you shagged a bloke?” Thus, she must never, ever know.  
  
“Jack bloody Harkness. Who’s that?”  
  
Rory glances back at the bench. Jack has returned his attention to his new lady friend. The smile was random flirting, not recognition. Time travelers, he thinks, and snorts. Never can run into each other in the right order.  
  
“Just someone from work. Real bastard,” he says, leaning in to steal a lick from his wife’s ice cream.  
  
“Oi! You’ve got your own!”  
  
“But yours always tastes better!”  
  
She elbows him again. He slides his arm around her waist and pulls her close against his side, which is both a great way to ensure further bruising and an excellent way to steal another lick of said ice cream when she’s not looking. They continue their walk, leaving Jack bloody Harkness to the cupboard, locked away with all the rest of the Centurion’s secrets, where he belongs.


End file.
